


Sometimes a cigar

by Petra



Category: Battlestar Galactica 2003
Genre: Episode Tag, F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-13
Updated: 2007-01-13
Packaged: 2019-09-19 20:07:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17008347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Petra/pseuds/Petra
Summary: Kara reports to the Commander's office when she is nearly done recuperating from her injury. (Post-'You Can't Go Home Again,' 1x05)





	Sometimes a cigar

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Odditycollector for handholding and Deconcentrate for beta reading.

"Good to see you on your feet, Lieutenant," Commander Adama said when she came into his office.

Kara looked at his professional lack of expression and wished for a tracking computer. Cylons were a lot easier to read than humans and you always knew where you stood with them.

With the Commander, though, she could be up for a dressing-down over haring out on her own, a rehash of the Zak issue -- except that the Commander had come to see her in sick bay -- or some new assignment, worse than the Nuggets. She wouldn't see any of it coming until it was too late to dodge, even for her, and she was one of the best bob-and-weavers out there.

She nodded and pushed away the flashback to the last time she stood here in his office, surrounded by civilized stuff and burned by his hoarse order to get out while she still could. "Thank you, sir."

He stood up from his desk and came around it, moving as efficiently as always. "You gave us quite a scare out there."

The troop deployment records Lee showed her while she was waiting for her knee to work again made her skin crawl and her heart warm. If she hadn't shot down the last Cylon in the sky, or if more of them had shown up, they would all have been headed to hell for her on the Commander's orders. "I didn't mean to, sir."

"No. I'm sure you didn't." He stopped, close enough to her to rip her a new one if he wanted to, his hands clasped behind his back. "So few things happen the way we mean them to."

Kara swallowed. If he was talking about Zak, or -- if she let herself wonder about all the possibilities, she'd wet herself before he even finished a frakking sentence. "No, sir." She almost never used the easiest answer, but anything else, anything personal, stuck in her throat.

"Don't do it again," the Commander said, and she looked up at him, trying to read him.

He looked worried, even though she was healed and everything had come out fine.

"No, sir. I'll avoid it in the future, sir."

He nodded and put his finger under her chin like her father used to do when she avoided looking at him, tipped her face up a few degrees, and kissed her.

Zak used to taste like sunshine, summers, and long walks on the beach.

The Commander tasted like water thawed from ice, imperfect and necessary.

He let her go a second later.

From behind her, Apollo said, "Gods, I --" He had to have come into the office after her, but she hadn't heard the door over the adrenaline-rush thump of her heart.

She had every right to stop Commander Adama from looking at her with fear and hope in his eyes by calling him out. He was totally out of line, the way she was back when, only worse.

"So, CAG," she said, turning on her heel and grinning, "what's the penalty for kissing a superior asshole?"

Lee's face was bright red. He started to back toward the door. "I'll come back."

"Nah." Kara caught him two steps from the door -- he could run faster than that, but he wasn't trying. Never did try to assert the authority he was supposed to have. "I think this is a dressing-down you should stick around for."

Adama cleared his throat. "Close the door."

Lee pulled it shut. "I didn't mean to interrupt."

Kara pulled him into the room. "We were just getting started." She winked, broadly and obviously, at Adama, who looked away from her. "Weren't we."

"I didn't have any disciplinary measures to discuss with you, Lieutenant Thrace."

She ignored Lee's "That's a first."

"Permission to speak freely, sir." She touched her mouth with her finger. "I think I might already have it, anyway."

Adama nodded. "Granted."

"What the frak were you thinking?" she snapped at him. "Thousands of people, the only thousands of people we've got, and you pulled off the CAP and waited here for the Cylons, all because of me?"

Lee put his hand on her shoulder, holding her back, maybe, in case she wanted to hit the real superior asshole in the room. "Starbuck --"

She rounded on him. "And you, you were there for every second of it, cheering him on. Well, captain, here's what I think about your search-and-rescue mission." She took his face in both hands and kissed him hard.

Lee put his arms around her so fast he might have been expecting her to pull that stunt and kissed her back like thirty-four minutes of sleep. He turned his face away when he needed breath and said, "If we had to leave you --"

Adama was right behind her -- she could feel his body heat and his presence like a loyal wingman. "We fought with everything we had." He put his arm around her, kissed the back of her neck, and hugged them both. "I wasn't going to lose you."

Kara shivered and turned to face him. "You could have lost everything else along the way, sir." She kissed him, this time, and Lee's hands on her breasts made it all feel like it was working right.

"But we didn't," Lee said, tucking his hands under her shirt, into the plain cups of her bra. If she'd known that she was getting this kind of talking-to, she'd have dressed nicer, or at least put her uniform on, doctor's orders to be off-duty for another three days or no. "Everything's all right."

"Don't ever do that again," Kara said, putting all the command-weight she could into it, and Adama grimaced right before she kissed him.

He got his hands down her pants in the middle of this kiss, cupping her carefully for all of a second before he said, "Kara," against her mouth and gave her a firm, hard stroke that made her knees shake.

"It was frakking dangerous," she said and leaned back on Lee, grinding her hips against him and tipping her head back to kiss him.

"And worth it." Lee thrust against her, rubbing circles on her nipples with his thumbs. "Gods, Kara, it was worth it."

Kara tugged on his hair and rolled her hips, getting Adama's fingers to just the right place, then just the right speed, with a little encouragement. "You -- you couldn't have known that, then."

Adama said, "What's done is done," his voice rougher than usual, and he got the speed just right to make her come, bracing herself against Lee's hips so she wouldn't fall.

"Yeah," Kara said, taking a deep breath, and another. Adama pulled his hand away, looking at her face without the fear he'd had before, and without anything like shame. "That's true."

Lee buried his face in the back of her neck, let his hands trail over her stomach and away, and said, "Is it enough?"

She squeezed his hip. "I can't tell you." It was bad manners to stand up straight in the CO's office -- first time that'd ever been true -- and leave them both red-faced and breathing hard. "I'm just glad I don't have to make that kind of decision."

Adama got hold of himself with a deep breath and gave her the kind of smile that meant he wasn't being the Commander. Only appropriate. "The Lords of Kobol shield you from ever having to make that call, Kara."

"And you, from ever having to do it again, sir." She'd never had the opportunity to salute someone who'd just made her come, but there's a first time for everything. It was a better response than anything her buzzing nerves could come up with.

Lee sighed behind her. "How long before you're flying again?"

She glanced at the chronometer on the Commander's desk. "Sixty-eight hours, twenty-eight minutes, and fourteen seconds, sir. Correction, twelve seconds."

"Good. Desk drills aren't teaching the recruits enough." Lee moved to her left side, clearing her way to the door.

Kara nodded and said, "I'll heal as fast as I can, sir."

"See that you do," the Commander said. "Dismissed, Lieutenant."

She saluted again out of ingrained habit and left, not bothering to keep the smile off of her face once she got into the corridors. No one bothered to ask what she was grinning about, which was just as well. They wouldn't have liked the answer. 


End file.
